In the year since I
began thinking about my paper for the conference “Feminism &
Classics IV,” the Leuven Homepage of Papyrus Archives1
has nearly doubled the number of archives within its purview,
reflecting not only the vigorous publication of papyri in this new
century, but also the continual process of drawing together papyri
that were once kept together by individuals, families, and
institutions in antiquity, but yet, upon discovery in modern times,
were sold to antiquities dealers and acquired by different
institutional collections in Europe and the US. Over time, many
papyri received discrete publication in papyrological volumes and
journals, although inter-connections with related texts remained
unrecognized, even when a single institution acquired them. Now that
the number of published papyrus texts is approaching 60,000, the
process of reuniting documents with their ancient owners proceeds
apace, with electronic search tools accelerating the process of
identifying individuals and families who lived in a specific village
or larger town at a particular point in time.

As is well known,
the dry climate of the desert areas adjacent to the eastern
Mediterranean, as well as the Nile valley, preserved perishable
materials from antiquity in large quantities, providing a rich store
of information about the lives of the inhabitants—from wealthy
landowners to those of moderate circumstances and even peasants,
struggling to make ends meet. Their documents, written in Greek or
the various native languages,2
enable us to write local histories of their communities and tell the
stories of the men and women who saved their papers and documents in
a detail similar to what is available for much later historical
periods. In the first half century or so of papyrus acquisition,
papyri and ostraca were for the most part unearthed either by
expeditions mounted by European and American institutions with the
expressed intent of bringing home the materials found, or by Egyptian
farmers, as they dismantled the mud-brick houses of ancient
settlements, or adjacent rubbish heaps and necropoleis, in their
search for fertilizer. The farmers, or other clandestine diggers,
sold what they found to dealers in antiquities, thereby isolating the
texts away from their ancient context. In addition, sophisticated
archeological techniques were seldom employed by earlier excavators
with a similar result, although more recent excavations have done
much to remedy the failure of the pioneers to track find-spots with
precision. It is increasingly clear, however, that few papyri were
found in isolation, and both family papers and administrative
documents were in many instances still grouped together when they
came out of the ground during the last 120 years. In part, ancient
archives identify themselves, even though dispersed to various
papyrus collections in modern times, because the same individuals and
places are repeatedly mentioned. While prosopography plays an
important role in reconstituting an ancient archive that lost its
archeological context, attention to acquisition records at the
institutions currently housing papyri which might belong to a
particular archive often bolsters the join, since such records give
the date and means by which the papyri in question entered the
specific collection. Contiguous inventory numbers within a single
collection, or acquisition by several institutions at about the same
time, contributes to the identification of an archive’s texts.
Papyrologists have come to label this latter process “museum
archeology,” and it is now an important facet in the effort to
set individual texts back into the contexts from which they once
derived.3
The Leuven Archives thus present efforts by several generations of
papyrologists in a format searchable by a wider group of scholars
with interests in the ancient world: it describes the texts that now
constitute the more than 300 archives and supplies bibliographic
information on each archive. This is an important source for the
lives ancient women actually lived.

I begin this paper
by looking at three archives—those of Aurelia Sarapias, Taësis,
and Babatha,4
for the archives of these three women share the curious feature of
having been found by excavators bundled or tied up together. Although
the women themselves were separated by time, place, and
socio-economic class, all three were apparently illiterate and unable
to read the papers they assembled. While the first and third archives
consist exclusively of business papers, the second includes only
personal letters. I shall then briefly pursue this same division of
either business documents or private letters in a number of other
archives and shall close with the observation that many interesting
papyri involving ancient women derive not from archives women
themselves compiled, but from archives collected by their menfolk,
for men appear to have been the more ready to intersperse personal
letters among their business papers.

Aurelia Sarapias was
a citizen of the city of Antinoopolis, founded by Hadrian and named
in memory of his favorite Antinous, although her papers were
excavated in the farming village of Tebtunis in the south-west corner
of the Fayum by the Oxford papyrologists B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt
in the winter of 1899/1900 and published by them in 1907.5
Sarapias’ relatively wealthy family maintained a residence in
the village, as well as owning agricultural lands elsewhere and
perhaps a house in Antinoopolis. Sarapias’ bundle of papers
divides neatly into two groups—texts concerning M. Aurelius
Sarapammon, dating between AD 248 and 265, and those concerning
Sarapias herself, clustering in the years AD 264-270, after she had
been widowed by her husband Paulus and left with a young daughter
Paulina to raise. Sarapammon was most likely Sarapias’ father,
and his papers came into her hands when the old man died, perhaps
shortly after she returned to her natal home upon the death of her
husband.6
In the mid-260’s Sarapias petitioned the prefect, asking that
he name her brother Aurelius Sarapion alias Alexander as guardian for
little Paulina and administrator of the child’s property, now
that Paulus was dead. As the petition suggests, Sarapias expected
Paulina to inherit from her father, despite the fact that he died
intestate. Nonetheless, Paulus’ estate was subsequently turned
over to his brother Pasigenes, not to his daughter. The fact that
Paulina did not become her father’s heir also explains the
presence in Aurelia Sarapias’ bundle of a rescript from the
emperor Gordian III, dated to AD 238 but copied at some point after
Gordian’s death in 244. The emperor was responding to a
question involving legitimacy of children and he declared that
registration was not legal cause for establishing either their
legitimacy or illegitimacy. Pasigenes had apparently questioned the
legal status of his niece Paulina, offering proof to authorities that
she was illegitimate on the grounds that her birth had never been
registered, and thus she was not eligible to become her father’s
legal heir. Sarapias’ papers , all written in Greek, give no
indication that she was literate in the language, neither in her
petition to the prefect, written throughout by the same professional
hand, nor in the two copies of the inventories of Paulus’
property and personal effects, each written by a different
professional scribe. Sarapias’ habit of fastening together
papers important to her suggests that she relied on non-verbal
signals, such as the arrangement of the sheets and the particular
format of a specific document, in order to distinguish one from
another. Sarapias was nonetheless by no means unsophisticated about
the worth of her husband’s possessions, and the meticulous
accounting of the items and slaves she surrendered to Pasigenes
included remarks on the condition and value of individual pieces, as
well as details that would have best been known to the wife of the
deceased Paulus: “A complete lamp-stand with a Cupid and lamp,
valued at [?]6 drachmas”; “a tunic new from the fuller,
with a Laconian stripe, worth a stater”; “white linen
cloths, 12 in number, worth 96 drachmas, at eight drachmas each.”7
No doubt Sarapias expected she would ultimately regain what she
handed over to her former brother-in-law, and the meticulousness of
the inventory underscores this aim on her part.

The peasant woman
Taësis was living in the Fayum village of Karanis in the mid- to
late-second century AD, apparently an older widow who shared her
domicile with two adult sons Apollinarios and Kalalas, their wives,
and children. Archeologists from the University of Michigan between
1924 and 1935 were among the earliest excavators to pay attention to
the contexts in which papyri were found, and they discovered Taësis’
archive, consisting of two personal letters in Greek, likewise
fastened together, in a room of her house. The letters had been sent
her by a third son also named Apollinarios, as he journeyed from
Karanis on his way to Rome and Misenum to serve in the Roman fleet.8
Once the young man arrived in Cyrene he discovered a man traveling in
Taësis’ direction, so he reported in the first letter
which arrived back home the fact that he had earlier taken advantage
of a traveler and dispatched his mother a letter; the letter from
Cyrene may never have reached Taësis, since it was not tied in
her bundle, or she may have discarded it, once it was read. In any
case, Apollinarios’ first letter in his mother’s
collection marked his arrival in Portus, the harbor the emperor
Trajan built to augment the capacity and safety of shipping at Ostia,
the port of Rome. Apollinarios assured his mother that he was in good
health and he urged her to write to him, sending letters via
Socrates, the local collector of money taxes at Karanis, for the
latter had access to the imperial mail service. Apollinarios’
second and last surviving letter was sent from Misenum and was
likewise occupied with good wishes for the family back home, together
with assurances of his own well-being, “for I have come to a
fine place” (eis kalon topon).9
The son enlisted the services of professional scribes to draft in
Greek the letters he sent home, and the mother Taësis was
probably compelled to appeal to a literate family member, if there
were one, or a fellow villager to read each out to her. She may even
have needed some Greek phrases in the letters translated into
Egyptian, for this was the language of daily life for many peasant
villagers, men and women alike.10

The Jewess Babatha
was a native of the Roman province of Arabia, but the Bar Kokhba
revolt, late in the reign of the emperor Hadrian, persuaded her to
flee with her step-daughter Shelamzion to the Nevel Hever in
Palestine, where both women perished in the so-called “Cave of
Letters,” not far from the shores of the Dead Sea. In common
with Aurelia Sarapias of Tebtunis, she too was a young widow with a
small son to raise. After the death of her second husband Judah, she
was the owner of considerable property through inheritance and
widowhood; Judah had been literate in Aramaic and wrote with a
practiced hand, but Babatha was illiterate in both Greek and Aramaic
and employed scribes to write her documents. She kept these in an
attractive leather purse, and when she deposited the purse in a
crevice of the cave’s wall for safe-keeping, she first placed
the purse within an animal skin refashioned to hold water, but now
filled by Babatha with balls of flaxen thread. While the contents of
the purse reveal her business acumen, the balls of threads served not
only as raw materials for making clothing, but provided her with the
strings and cloths with which to organize the documents she could not
herself read. In addition, documents of particular interest to
Babatha and Shelamzion—a deed of gift to Babatha’s
mother,11
Shelamzion’s marriage contract, and the ketubba for
Babatha’s marriage to Judah—were also tied together in
separate bundles, along with deeds to property mentioned in the
contracts.12

We simply do not
know why Taësis tied her two letters from Apollinarios together,
nor do we know what happened to Apollinarios once he arrived in
Misenum—did he die in Roman service, or did he merely become
negligent and forgetful, preoccupied with his new life and career? Or
did Taësis, certainly a grandmother, die before additional
letters arrived? It is easier to suggest motives as to why the two
young widows bundled their documents together, ordering, separating,
and combining, in order to convince others that they knew well the
contents of each papyrus sheet, for the documents guaranteed
ownership of specific properties and funds. Both young widows,
Sarapias and Babatha, also retained copies of official Roman
pronouncements that addressed the legal matters lying at the center
of their struggles to safeguard a financial future for their young
children. Aurelia Sarapias retained the emperor’s rescript on
the relation of a child’s registration to legitimacy, and
Babatharetained in three copies, written out by two different
hands, a Greek version of one of the Roman praetor’s actiones
dealing with guardianship of orphans.13
Some four months after the appointment of guardians for her orphaned
son, Babatha sent a petition to the Roman governor, bewailing the
niggardliness of a male kinsman, who, “though he had sufficient
funds, neither paid family debts, nor contributed to the orphan’s
maintenance,” and she repeatedly protested the paltry sums her
son’s guardians were providing.14
In October 125, Babatha continued her efforts with a summons against
one of the guardians and filed a deposition against them both,
charging them with not supplying “maintenance money
commensurate with the income from the interest on his money and
property and commensurate in particular with a style of life which
befits him.” Babatha suggested that the guardians allow her to
manage the boy’s assets so that she might increase them
threefold. Babatha seems to have been no more successful than was
Aurelia Sarapias in manipulating into tangible results the copies of
the official rulings they both acquired and diligently preserved, for
the latest dated document in Babatha’s purse from mid-August
132 was a receipt she issued to the current guardian of her son,
indicating she was receiving the same amount of money per month as
eight years previous.

The archives of
Sarapias and Babatha consist only of business papers and no personal
letters; if the two young widows received letters from family and
friends, they either discarded them after reading, or kept private
letters separate from their documents. By contrast, Taësis’
entire archive consisted of the two letters and no business papers,
and, in this regard, she resembles Satornila, an older widow of far
higher socio-economic status, living in the Fayum village of
Philadelphia late in the second century AD; Satornila also seems to
have been illiterate, although her five adult sons were fully
literate in Greek. The archive she assembled consisted only of
letters and is unusual in that of the eight sheets of papyrus in her
assemblage, two sheets contained two letters each and one sheet,
three letters. Satornila was the addressee in most of the letters and
was mentioned throughout, as her sons, all of them Roman citizens,
journeyed away from home and wrote back concerns about their mother’s
well being. The most active letter writer was her eldest son
Sempronius whom government business had taken north to the area
around Alexandria. Because the letters were purchased from dealers
and are now spread among at least five collections in the US and
Europe, there is no way to know whether Satornila isolated her
letters in some fashion and kept business papers, now apparently
lost, elsewhere.15

Another small
archive of business papers in Greek was kept by Berenike, a literate
woman resident in the district capital of Oxyrhynchos: a joint will
of about AD 98/99 for Berenike and her husband Pasion that enabled
her, not the couple’s sons, to take over Pasion’s
business affairs, should she outlive him; a draft of a petition to
the Roman prefect in AD 102 in which Apion, a wine merchant and
former business associate of Pasion who had since died, accused
Berenike of defrauding him of wine deposited with Pasion and of
refusing to return IOUs for money lent him by Pasion when she sold
his deposit of wine and pocketed the profits; and finally an account
of income and expenditure written by Berenike herself in a
professional hand about AD 106.16
Apion’s petition made clear that his claims had already
received a hearing before the highest Roman official in the district
and that Berenike succeeded on that occasion in thwarting his
attempts to inspect Pasion’s ledger recording the earlier
transactions and to learn how much profit she made through the sale
of what he claimed was his wine. Whether or not the subsequent
attempt on Apion’s part resolved their dispute is at present
unknown, and may remain so in the absence of further documentation,
but, as Peter van Minnen has pointed out, Berenike was more than a
match for Apion, confident at the first hearing that it was her right
to liquidate the stock of wine on hand at Pasion’s death and to
brush aside demands from a wine merchant who had been in debt to
Pasion.

The archive of
Aurelia Charite, a wealthy resident of the district capital of
Hermoupolis in Upper Egypt during the middle of the fourth century
AD, contains not only contracts of lease, lists of land holdings and
their registration, and tax receipts that concerned her property. It
is likely that papers of her husband, the important magistrate and
landowner Aurelius Adelphios,came into Charite’s
possession when her husband left her a widow about AD 326.17
She apparently then became the keeper of the family’s papers
from the death of her husband until her own death some fourteen years
later, when the archive passed into the hands of her son, Aurelius
Asklepiades. Papyri documenting this large and extended family over
three generations are many, and debates continue as to the extent to
which all these texts were gathered together into a single assemblage
in antiquity; nonetheless, it seems likely that those of concern to
Adelphios, Charite, and Asklepiades, a nuclear family, probably
were.18
There are no private letters in the assemblage of some forty texts
directly involving Charite, although both Charite and her mother,
Aurelia Demetria alias Ammonia, were literate in Greek. The papers of
Adelphios contained one business letter addressed to him by an
underling, and those of Asklepiades, three letters concerning
official matters. If the family received letters from relatives and
friends, these were kept apart, or discarded, and have not been
found. By contrast, the archive of Ploutogeneia contains at present
eight highly personal letters from the years AD 297-298, and,
although the letters had been sent to the Fayum village of
Philadelphia and were no doubt found together there, they were bought
by the University of Michigan from a dealer and were thus deprived of
archeological context.19
All the letters were dictated to professional scribes, and family
members were probably illiterates, since none closed their greetings
with a salutation in their own hands, as was customary for literates
to do. Five of the letters were from Paniskos to his wife
Ploutogeneia, while she was residing in the family home in
Philadelphia, and in them he repeatedly pleaded with her to join him
in Coptus. Ploutogeneia never did and, according to Paniskos, she did
not even bother to answer his letters, but instead went off to
Alexandria for a time, despite his urgings that she stay in the
village. Other letters were sent by Paniskos to his brother-in-law
Aion and by Ploutogeneia to her mother Heliodora. There are no
business papers in the assemblage, and the separation of personal
letters from documents may provide an additional indication that
Ploutogeneia was the assembler of the archive, rather than her
husband Paniskos, as earlier editors assumed.

Archives named for
women in the Leuven Archives are particularly frequent in later
antiquity, as more landed property devolved to women through
inheritances—a topic of considerable interest to those studying
the social and economic life of women, as noted in Maryline Parca’s
paper entitled “Papyrology, Gender, and Diversity.” Dated
to the third and fourth centuries AD are a number of business
archives gathered by women, of which four will be mentioned briefly
here; their papers are concerned with the management of agricultural
and other properties, and no private letters have thus far been shown
to adhere: Aurelia Tetoueis of the Fayum village of Karanis (six
texts); and from the district capital of Oxyrhynchos, Aurelia
Diogenis alias Tourbiaina (three texts); Claudia Isidora alias Apias
(an as-yet-uncertain number of texts); Aurelia Ptolemaïs (six
texts).20
This latter Ptolemaïs was the eldest daughter of Aurelius
Hermogenes, a councilor and president of the council at Oxyrhynchos,
a wealthy man, father of five children, and with a taste for Greek
literature. Ptolemaïs seems to have plundered her father’s
library after the old man’s death, reusing, for example, the
blank back of a papyrus roll containing book eighteen of Julius
Africanus’ Kestoi for the copy she had made of his will
that confirmed payment of her dowry.21

Archives that
scholars named after male members of the family, because they were
the assemblers, seem more likely to intersperse documents of various
types, and they kept business papers together with private letters
from and about family and friends. What usually occasioned personal
letters was, of course, the separation of family members, and male
members of the family not only had greater obligations and
opportunities to spend time away from home, but they apparently found
it congenial and convenient to jumble together the sheets of papyrus
acquired during a sojourn, whatever their content, and carry these
back home. As a result, interesting letters from women to a male
family member are often found in men’s assemblages. A single
example of family papers collected by a man, the archive of L.
Pompeius Niger, veteran of the legio XXII Deiotariana, must
suffice for closer inspection here.22
The archive assembled by Pompeius Niger contains at present fifteen
texts, now scattered among at least five institutions and published
at different times; he was apparently born in Oxyrhynchos, but after
his discharge from active service in AD 44 he may have settled in the
Fayum, perhaps in the village of Oxyrhyncha. The family, however,
continued to maintain a house in Oxyrhynchos, a portion of which
Niger had inherited, and, when he visited the city, he stayed there.
His papers for the most part document his life in retirement—a
census return, a petition, several contracts, and some eight private
letters addressed to him from friends and women of the family—from
his sister Charitous, and his daughters Herennia and Thaubas. Like
Pompeius Niger, the women of thefamily were literate in
Greek, for they did pen greetings in their own hand at the close if
they employed a professional scribe to write the body of a letter.
Pompeius Niger preserved two letters from his daughter Herennia; in
one letter she reminded her father to purchase various items of
clothing and in the other she reported that she had not only bought
olives for him, but asked him for advice about a contribution
apparently demanded from the family for the sanctuary of Souchos,
crocodile god of the Fayum. In both letters Herennia mentioned
“little Pompeius,” for she had named her young son after
her father and perhaps also after her brother, another Pompeius.23
Particularly poignant, then, is Thaubas’ letter to her father
announcing Herennia’s death: “... she already came safely
through a premature delivery on the ninth of Phaophi. You see, she
gave birth to an eight-month child, dead,24
she lived on for four days, but then died herself. She received a
funeral from us and her husband, as was right, and has been
transported to Alabanthis. So, if you come and want to, you can see
her.”25
Similar assemblages by men of the family in which women figure
prominently are: the archive of Tryphon, weaver in Julio-Claudian
Oxyrhynchos,26
the archive of Nemesion, tax collector at Philadelphia for
Julio-Claudian emperors; the archive of Apollonios, landowner at
Hermoupolis and strategos of the Heptakomia during the Jewish revolt
late in the reign of Trajan.

The evidence
presented here does point to a tendency among women in the eastern
Mediterranean during the Roman and Late Antique periods, whether
literate in Greek or not, to have been more likely than their menfolk
to separate out private letters from their business papers and to
have stored the personal letters they wished to keep in different and
perhaps more private places. My examples do no more than highlight an
apparent gender difference in regard to the proper disposition of
personal letters to be saved after reading. Those who write the
social history of this society find that archives collected by women
often document their intelligence and business acumen, but that
personal letters to and about ancient women are as likely to occur in
archives collected by men as by women.

2In Egypt the native language
was written in a variety of scripts (hieroglyphic, hieratic,
demotic, and Coptic); the native language in documents from the time
of the Bar Kokhba revolt considered here was Aramaic.

3
A particularly successful example of “museum archeology”
not only augmented the archive conventionally known as the “archive
of Dryton,” a Greek cavalry officer in service at Pathyris,
Upper Egypt, in the middle of the second century BC, but also
enhanced the role of Dryton’s second wife Apollonia and their
eldest daughter (Vandorpe 2002, 7-12). The paper for this panel
entitled “Papyrology, gender, and diversity” also gives
a brief account of Apollonia.

4
The papers of Aurelia Sarapias are listed in the Leuven Archives
under “Family archive of Sarapias”; those of Taësis
and Babatha appear under each woman’s name. The archive of
Babatha was found in a large, three-chambered cave in the northern
escarpment of the Nahal Hever, near the village of En-Gedi in the
Roman province of Judaea. The other archives considered here come
from Egypt.

5
See Grenfell and Hunt 1907, and Verhoogt 1998, who lists Sarapias’
documents, as well as her father’s, all of which were
published in Grenfell and Hunt 1907; see also Hanson 2005. The
Leuven Archives provide a detailed summary of Sarapias’ papers
and bibliography. The Fayum, the modern name for the Arsinoite nome,
lies to the west of the Nile, some 100 kilometers south of Cairo; it
was one of the richest farming districts in Egypt. For the Fayum, in
general, and the Fayum villages of Tebtunis, Karanis, and
Philadelphia, as well as the town of Oxyrhynchos, see Bagnall and
Rathbone 2004, 127-154, 158-161.

6
For preferences of the widows of Roman Egypt with regard to their
living arrangements, see Hanson 2000.

10
A private letter in Greek to family members (SB XVIII 13867)
begins with the statement that it should be translated for the
women, for peasant women in the farming villages were especially
likely to know little or no Greek. The paper for this panel entitled
“The Bilingual Written Environment of Late Antique Egypt”
underscores the preference of women for the Egyptian language in the
drafting of their legal documents, once this became a possibility in
the late period.

11
See Cotton 1997, 179-180. For the first edition of Babatha’s
archive, see Lewis 1989; the documents mentioned are P.Yadin I7 and 17 (both in Greek), and P.Yadin II 10 (Aramaic).

12For a reconstruction of
Babatha’s purse, see Yadin 1963, 258-259 and fig. 158; for
description of the Babatha finds in Locus 61, near the south-western
corner of Hall C, see Yadin 1962, 38-40. Photos of the purse and the
wrapped papyri in Yadin 1971, 222-228. Cf. Lewis 1989, 3-4.

13
The papyri mentioned in the text are P.Yadin I 28, 29, and
30, ca. AD 125. For the appropriateness of the praetor’s
pronouncement to Babatha’s case see, Cotton 1993, 104-108.

15
For the collections that house Satornila letters, their publication
over time, and an extended discussion with family tree, see the
Leuven Archives under “Satornila and her sons.” Also
Rowlandson 1998, 143-147.

18
Here I have adhered to the cogent arguments of Martin 1994, 576-577.

19
For the first publication of the letters, see Winter 1935, 275-298.
Also Rowlandson 1998, 147-151, and the extensive discussion in
Leuven Archives under “Ploutogeneia,” with family tree
and additions to the archive (SB XVI 12326 and a new fragment
of P.Mich. III 219).

20
The archives mentioned are listed in the Leuven Archives under each
woman’s name.

21
For Aurelia Ptolemaïs, see Bagnall 1992. For archives of women
resident in Jeme (Upper Egypt) during the seventh and eighth
centuries AD and their business papers, see Wilfong 2002.

22
The archive of L. Pompeius Niger is listed in the Leuven Archives
under “Pompeius Niger.”

23
Herennia’s letters to her father are SB VI 9122 and
P.Mert. II 63; Thaubas’ letter is P.Fouad I 75,
translated in Rowlandson 1998, 293-294.

26
In the Leuven Archives, these three are listed as follows: Tryphon
weaver, Nemesion, Apollonius strategos. See also Rowlandson 1998,
112-118 (documents involving Tryphon’s first and second wives,
Demetrous and Saraeus, and his mother, Thamounis, preserved with
documents involving his weaving business), 326-327 (letter to
Nemesion from his wife Thermouthis, preserved along with other
personal letters and his business papers from the local tax office
which he headed), and 118-124 (letters to Apollonios from his wife
Aline, his mother Eudaimonis, and other members of this large
household, interspersed with business papers from his time as chief
official in the Roman bureaucracy of the Heptakomia). For the women
of the Apollonios archive, see also Cribiore 2002.